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Emily Wilson on Sappho ("Ode to Aphrodite")
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This is the kind of conversation I dreamed about having when I began this podcast. Emily Wilson joins Close Readings to talk about Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite," a poet and poem at the root of the lyric tradition in European poetry. You'll hear Emily read the poem in the Ancient Greek and then again in Anne Carson's English translation. We talk about the nature of erotic desire, what it's like to have a crush, and how a poem can be like a spell.
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor of the Humanities. She is a celebrated translator of Homer, having translated both The Odyssey and, more recently, The Iliad (both from Norton). Wilson has also published translations of Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca—and is the author of three monographs: The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford, 2014), The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard, 2007), and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins, 2004). You can follow Emily on Twitter.
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Transcript
Introduction and Emily Wilson's Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I am so thrilled today. This is an episode I've been wanting to record for as long as I've had this podcast going, really.
00:00:16
Speaker
And it took some effort to get it scheduled, and I'm just so glad it's happening today. My guest today is Emily Wilson, and she is known to many of you, I'm sure, as a translator of Homer. I'll tell you more about other things she's done in a moment. The poem
00:00:39
Speaker
that Emily has chosen for our discussion today is by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, a poem referred to sometimes as the ode to Aphrodite or the hymn to Aphrodite, the first of Sappho's poems.
00:00:57
Speaker
And we'll say much more about that poem in just a moment. Of course, I will have linked by the time that you see this to a text of the poem in the episode notes. That poem you will see in the poet Anne Carson's translation from her collection of Sappho called If Not Winter.
00:01:18
Speaker
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds the College for Women Class of 1963 Professor in the Humanities.
00:01:29
Speaker
She's been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and Early Modern Scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow. She is the author of a few monographs. The first, I think, called Mocked with Death, Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, which was published by Johns Hopkins Press in 2004.
00:01:53
Speaker
The Death of Socrates, Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint, published by Harvard in 2007, and The Greatest Empire, a Life of Seneca, published by Oxford in 2014. And of course, Emily Wilson is a celebrated translator.
Impact of Wilson's Odyssey Translation
00:02:10
Speaker
of Euripides, of Sophocles, and now, I think, to her everlasting fame of Homer. Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, which was published in 2017 by Norton and has come out in a few different editions, so teaching editions, critical editions, and that first edition from Norton as well.
00:02:37
Speaker
changed the way people in English read Homer, I think, changed the way people who read in English teach Homer, changed the way people think about epic and ancient Greek poetry. I can say personally that I am someone who, though, you know, as you all know me, I'm not a classicist by any means. I'm a scholar of modern and contemporary, mostly American poetry.
00:03:05
Speaker
At Villanova, I teach a first year course as part of our general education requirements. It's sort of a great books course and I teach The Odyssey in that course.
00:03:16
Speaker
And Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey has made my life so much better every fall at Villanova. I mean, it is just a pleasure to read. I say, I can say that, and listen, there are other marvelous translations in English of that book that I have also valued over the years. You know, I think when I was in college, I read the Fitzgerald and the maybe the Fagels translations, but
00:03:44
Speaker
I will say that when I have students, you know, I order Emily's edition of the book.
00:03:53
Speaker
And some students have other copies lying around. And I say, that's fine. It'll be interesting to compare translations at some point. But I tell them, I'll bet once you see the way this new translation sounds, you'll wish you had it and you'll get it. And often I'm right.
Wilson's Iliad Translation and Influence
00:04:08
Speaker
She has also much more recently published, sort of completed the Homeric sequence, but in reverse, has now published in 2023 a translation of the Iliad.
00:04:23
Speaker
These translations will be read for many, many years to come.
00:04:31
Speaker
clear, they sound like poetry, they are beautifully teachable, but they are also just quite moving and exciting books to read. So they bring Homer to life in something like the way I like to think that Chapman's Homer brought Homer to life for Keats.
00:04:57
Speaker
And perhaps the most personal thing I want to say about this is that my daughter recently became interested in Greek mythology. She went through a Percy Jackson phase, and I said to her one day, would you like to know where some of these stories come from? And she said, because I was teaching The Odyssey at the time, she said, sure. And I started to read to her from book one of Emily's translation of The Odyssey.
00:05:24
Speaker
And she wouldn't let me stop. It became our bedtime reading every night for several weeks. We got all the way through The Odyssey. It's a marvelous book. I mean, for those of you who don't know the story, towards the end, it gets quite bloody and violent. And I remember I was in the middle of one of these just very kind of graphic descriptions of violence. Odysseus is laying the suitors to waste at this point.
00:05:53
Speaker
And I looked up at my daughter and I said, is this too violent for you? And she looked at me transfixed and she said, yes, please don't stop. She's waiting for the Iliad then. Yeah, maybe so. So yeah, I have the Iliad ready to go. We'll
Family Engagement with The Odyssey
00:06:10
Speaker
see. Anyway, so I offer that as you know, obviously it's a father story about my daughter, wonderful kind of thing. But also I just want to say,
00:06:20
Speaker
I have read The Odyssey many times. Like I say, I've taught it many times. It was the first time in my life I read it aloud from beginning to end.
00:06:29
Speaker
And I got things about it that I did not get before. I mean, I got its kind of propulsive rhythm, and this is in large part due to Emily's translation, which is in English blank verse, which is, I think, not something that's been talked about enough in much of the celebration around the translation. We don't hear enough about the versification of it.
00:06:55
Speaker
there is just something beautiful and kind of at once natural, but at the same time kind of beautifully artifice about that blank verse as Emily handles it that just made it not feel like a drag at all to read thousands and thousands of lines of ancient Greek poetry allowed at bedtime. You know, I looked forward to it and I'm sort of nostalgic about it's having passed, so I'm eager to begin
00:07:24
Speaker
the Iliad with my daughter. But before I do that, let me welcome Emily Wilson to Close Readings. Emily, how are you doing today? I'm doing fine. Thank you so much for those very kind words and for making the time to talk to me and having me on the show. I'm excited to talk to you. I'm a little bit snuffly from allergies, so I apologize in advance if I cough or sneeze or something in the middle.
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, no, no apology necessary. Totally understood. It's it's spring. It seems to be a cold spring day today. And we're not so far away. Right. You're you're at Philadelphia. Yeah. Yeah. But we're connected now through the Internet.
Focus on Sappho and Her Poetry
00:08:01
Speaker
And Emily, you know, I knew like I say, I knew I wanted to have you on the podcast and it seemed to me there were so many options for kinds of things we could do. Of course, like the nature of this podcast lends itself not to epic, but to lyric.
00:08:15
Speaker
And so, while I think at some point perhaps we raised and then ultimately dismissed the idea of doing a little set piece from your Homer translations, and we talked about other options, maybe a speech from a play that you had translated or something like this.
00:08:32
Speaker
Ultimately, we arrived at Sappho. And I think one thing that might be useful for our listeners is just for you to do a bit of context laying. So can you tell us a little bit about who Sappho was when she lived?
00:08:52
Speaker
what we can know and do know and can't and don't know about her life and her poetry just as a way to get started and maybe somewhere along the way tell us why or how it was you became a reader of her poetry and what it's meant to you over the years.
Performance and Context of Sappho's Poetry
00:09:13
Speaker
Right. So I first started learning Ancient Greek in high school and tiny bits of Sappho were some of the first bits we did because you can read a whole fragment and it's only three words. So you don't actually need to have a big vocabulary to just get started with reading at least a few words of Sappho.
00:09:31
Speaker
So Sappho lived between Homo and Sophocles, probably roughly 430 to 570 BC, something like that. She lived on the island of Lesbos, which is why we have the word lesbian, because it's based on Sappho or being sapphic.
00:09:48
Speaker
The question of what do we know about her biography beyond that she was a female lyric composer in an era where of course most poets were not female. She composed lyric poetry. We're told that there were originally something like eight or nine books of her poetry that were known in
00:10:06
Speaker
to the scholars in Alexandria, of which we only have one complete poem, which is the one we're going to talk about today, and then a bunch of fragments, some of which are preserved in quotations by other ancient authors, and some of which are preserved on papyrus. She composed in lyric meters, meaning meters that are more complex than the meter of either Homer or
00:10:29
Speaker
tragic or comic dialogue and they're designed to be performed with musical accompaniment and probably to be performed either by a group of women or a single female singer or perhaps a mixture.
00:10:45
Speaker
So I think presumably it makes a difference whether we imagine this poem was being sung by a bunch of women singing together, even though it has the name Sappho and seems to suggest the individual lone speaker telling about her individual feelings. But it was presumably public performance poetry.
00:11:05
Speaker
Was it performed originally at a festival to Aphrodite or at some other kind of festival? Perhaps, but we really don't know very much.
Musicality in Ancient vs. Modern Poetry
00:11:14
Speaker
She was probably from an aristocratic family. We have the names of her brothers from a recently discovered poem.
00:11:20
Speaker
The family may have been exiled, something like halfway through her life there were lots of political backs and faults in archaic Lesbos about which of the many aristocratic families was going to gain control of the island. So I think that may also make a difference to how do we read Sappho in that there are quite a lot of allusions to stuff like gold headdresses and fancy flowers and things that are the
00:11:47
Speaker
The things that go along with an aristocratic, wealthy lifestyle is also part of what's there in Sappho's poetry. Just remembering the lyric means song. Sorry, you were saying something much more interesting, but I just wanted to ask those bits of gold and so on. The implication here is those weren't simply figurative things she was reaching for, but those were perhaps
00:12:10
Speaker
things that she lived around and with. Things that she lived around and with, and also that such a thing is conspicuous consumption, there's also such a thing as conspicuous poetic performance of that consumption. And that's also part of the discourse of Saffa's at least extant poetry.
00:12:26
Speaker
Yeah, so sorry. And then you were starting to say something, I think, about lyric and song, maybe. Yes. I mean, so I know that a lot of the podcasts that you've done have been about contemporary lyric. And of course, lyric within a contemporary poetry context means something on the page or on the Kindle or on the phone, or perhaps
00:12:45
Speaker
you go to a poetry reading, but it's not primarily imagined as something which, of course, you're going to have a musical accompaniment. Of course, it's going to have a regular pattern of rhythm that will go with a particular musical score. Whereas Sappho's version of lyric, it's literally designed to be performed with a lyre or some other kind of musical instrument.
00:13:12
Speaker
I mean, I've always understood that to be where we get the term lyric, right? Exactly. That is music or sorry, a poem or a song that's meant to be accompanied by the lyre. And what was the lyre? It's an ancient instrument, right? People might not.
00:13:26
Speaker
No, exactly what it's like. It's an ancient string instrument, which in a way, maybe it's the ancient equivalent of a guitar, but it has multiple strings and then was strummed. I mean, there have been various attempts to try to reconstruct ancient music, and none of them, I think, are all that convincing.
00:13:45
Speaker
So some ancient lyric was performed just with a lyre, some also had pipe music, the aulos or the double different kinds of pipe music may also have been part of the musical accompaniment. And some of this poetry may also have had dancing as part of it as well. Right. But that story, I mean, what you say is so right that in sort of contemporary usage among poets these days, when we use the term lyric, what we
00:14:11
Speaker
The idea of musicality is pretty distant and if present at all sort of as though by metaphor. What people tend to mean by the, tend to designate with the term lyric today is something about interiority or the self or what have you. So we get a kind of opposition between say lyric poetry and conceptual poetry or lyric poetry and documentary poetry.
00:14:39
Speaker
It's not at all obvious what the connection is to my mind, and this is a topic that has become an interesting one in poetry studies, and I'm thinking of people like Virginia Jackson and Yopi Prins.
00:14:54
Speaker
Jenny Jackson, who was on the podcast earlier, has written about this, but sort of making the connection between musicality at its origins and some idea of the self today. It's not clear what those things have to do with each other, really, except by a sort of historical accident, right, that that kind of poem became a short poem
00:15:20
Speaker
Although on the other hand, I mean, I'm curious because this does, I mean, Safo's name is in this poem that we're... Safo's name is in this poem, yes. That we'll be looking at today. So there's something maybe... Is it an accident or is it about a historical story about the reception of Safo in particular, as well as maybe other ancient lyric poets as well? I mean, I guess one thing I just wanted to say also is that lyric wasn't the only musical genre, right? I mean, drama also